Spence-Peterson Peaks At 695K Viewers

Not only did IBF welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr.’s record grow on Saturday, but so did his following.

Spence’s 8th round TKO victory over Lamont Peterson netted him more than twice the viewers than his previous fight against Kell Brook.

According to the ratings released on Tuesday via Nielsen, the title fight between Spence and Peterson drew a peak audience of 695,000, with an average audience of 637,000.

Spence’s prior performance, an 11th-round knockout of Kell Brook in May of 2017 attracted a peak viewership of 337,000. The telecast of Spence taking the IBF welterweight title from Brook in Brook’s hometown of Sheffield, England, averaged 291,000 viewers.

The most significant difference between those two broadcasts is that Spence-Brook aired live late on a Saturday afternoon on the East Coast of the United States. Spence-Brook also took place on Memorial Day weekend in the U.S.

The Spence-Peterson fight aired live in prime time on the East Coast on Saturday night from Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

While this audience was great for Spence, he drew by far the biggest ratings of his career in August 2016. Spence would stop Leonadrd Bundu in a IBF elimination fight that exceeded six million viewers on NBC.

The NBC fight followed a broadcast the basketball gold-medal game of the 2016 Summer Olympics, which featured the United States defeating Serbia.

Showtime, a premium cable channel, has roughly 24 million subscribers in the United States. NBC is available in approximately 120 million homes in the U.S.

The opener of Showtime’s doubleheader Saturday night – Robert Easter Jr.’s split-decision defeat of Javier Fortuna in a 12-round lightweight fight – attracted a peak audience of 540,000. An average of 462,000 viewers watched Easter’s narrow win against Fortuna.